Slovakia/ 4.2 Specific policy issues and recent debates

4.2.11 New technologies and digitalisation in the arts and culture

In the area of informationisation of culture, the Ministry of Culture has established a permanent advisory body - the Council of the Minister of Culture for the Informationisation of Culture. The Council will concentrate on the area of informationisation of culture, whose productions are stored and diffused in libraries, museums, galleries, institutions of conservation of the Monument fund, theatre, film, music, literature, visual arts, design and other institutions within and beyond the Department of Culture.

The Council discusses conceptional and strategic materials relating to the informationisation of culture, support for priority information projects from the Ministry of Culture budget and conditions for the participation of individual projects in support programmes related with informationisation (Operation Programme for Informationisation of Society). The subjects of professional activity of the Council in 2007 were chiefly in these areas:

digitalisation of the contents of the cultural heritage (libraries, museums, galleries, film archives, other archives);

interoperability of information systems in culture (connection of information systems of organisations within the Ministry of Culture, and connection of culture systems with science and education sectors);

possibilities for storing digitalised cultural contents and public access to them; and

the Cultural Profile of Slovakia (internet portal).

In relation to the digitalisation of cultural contents, the Council and the Ministry of Culture, in 2007, concentrated on research into the possibilities of the coordination of digitalisation in the Slovak Republic, and a proposal for a register of standards for digitalisation. In the future, partial digitalisation projects should be submitted to the Council as part of the national project, the Slovak digital library. The Slovak National Library, in Martin in 2007, prepared a working document, Digitalisation Strategy in SlovakiaStratégia digitalizácie na Slovensku, and also an internet site on digitalisation, http://www.viks.sk/digitus/. The programme of digitalisation of cultural contents should also be open to cooperation under a public private partnership.

The basic intention of the process of digitalisation of the cultural and intellectual heritage in Slovakia is to create a network of digitalised workplaces so that digitalisation is decentralised onto the level of specialised competence sectors for the individual areas (libraries, museums, galleries, audiovisual heritage, archives). A strategic intention is the construction of the Slovak digital library, after the model of the European Digital Library in 2010.

In the area of interoperability of information systems, the University Library in Bratislava was authorised to coordinate specialist activities and, in 2006, elaborated a start-up information and methodical document, eCulture - Interoperability of information systems, which includes definitions of the fundamental concepts, the designation of international standards and goals for the interoperability of information systems in culture in Slovakia.

In the area of new technologies in culture, the individual activities in Slovakia concentrated mainly on the usage of these technologies for the conservation, storage and dissemination of cultural heritage. Special support programmes and conception materials for cultural policy, referring to the development and usage of the new technologies in artistic creation, so far do not exist in Slovakia. The individual activities (creation, shows, workshops, festivals) in this area take place on the platform of various artistic groupings, mainly in the environment of visual arts and audiovisual art.

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